I used all three of the leaf brushes starting with the darkest green and lighter as I move forward. I like that effect. I mentioned using a brush for texture. I like texture a lot. I pretty much abstracted the sky and clouds by using a texture brush to roughen things up. All done.

I brought the pattern into PhotoShop on my computer and used an offset filter to show the edges better. Not looking too good.

Using heal and stamp brushes I covered up the edge with texture taken from other areas of the image. This takes a little work, but you get it looking pretty good that way.

There is still some areas that look repeated when tiled. You can keep working that out more if you want. The best thing to do, is be aware of light and dark in your textures as you apply them. Trying to match contrasting areas is what causes the sharpness in the borders. You will have less work in cleanup if you are careful making your texturing in your patterns. We are thinking of using this design on a shower curtain.

It took me long enough, but now I will discuss the way most people draw. Most folks just draw lines and make them look like something. Sounds easy and it can be if you stick to a simple cartoon style, I need some palm trees so I draw some lines ….

Like a coloring book you just fill in the color. With digital there is an easy tool for that surprisingly called the fill tool. You tap inside the shape and as long as it is closed with no holes, it will fill it in with whatever color you want. And some people think this art stuff is difficult.

Some lines and it does look kinda like some sorta tropical leaves. Squint and use your imagination and you might see it.

Using the basic method I came up with a palm tree … sort of like. I tried a little harder and got a somewhat better look. The trunk was created the same way and then I did some shading and texturing, It's digital, so it was easy at that point to copy, move, flip, resize … ending up a couple of fairly good stylized palms.

Some extra texture on the trunks and some shaping to the leaves. Not the Mona Lisa of palm trees, but close enough for my use.

I know up until now I have used the method of starting in grayscale, but this tiki is what the cool kid artist call a speed sketch, so I started more simply. I used the vector method to create the basic head shape already the color I wanted. Then quite quickly I sketched in the features, eyes, nose, mouth, and some other stuff. It was sloppy but I find that you often come up with some fun images by just letting your hand go where it wants. You get some extra strange lines that way, but as they say in the music biz, we can fix that in the mix.

The eyes were kinda dorky and the nose was weird. With a brush I covered up some lines and added some shaping, coloring, and shading. Looks a little better.

Extra heavy dark shading around the eyes and nose adds a little drama. I smoothed pretty hard and blurred the image more than usual. I think it gives it a bit of a watercolor look.

Textured and highlighted the guy.

Gave the tiki some wood grain and made a couple of copies and resized them. Now I got a tiki family. Might as well add some palm trees. Notice that one of the tikis looks like it is behind the palms and the others in front. That is the magic of layers again. Each one and the trees are in different layers. You can shuffle the layers around any way you want to create your scene.

Added some background as always. Making grass brushes is fun.

Added some sky and did some cleanup and extra shadowing. It is best to wait until you are sure you have done enough damage before you combine all the layers which is usually the final step. One example of that is you may notice in the first background image the bottom of one of the palms seemed to be sticking out of the baby tikis head. Since the tree was on a different layer, I was able to erase the part I did not like without affecting the rest of the image. This was a fun image to make.